The web is amazing. You can find the world’s information, stay connected to friends and family, do your shopping, or be entertained all by simply tapping on a link on your phone. But challenges like high data cost and slow, 2G-like connections often prevent our users from getting the most out of the web.

We want to make Chrome a better place for all our users to enjoy the mobile web. Chrome’s new features on Data Saver, downloads, and content discovery were designed to help you do more on the web, no matter what phone or network you may have.

Save more data, even on videosWe launched Data Saver to help you enjoy more content on the web while using less data. With Data Saver enabled, Chrome compresses the images and text you load, saving up to 60% of your data without changing the content you enjoy.

Now, we have brought the same technology to videos, which allows you to save up to 67% of your data when viewing MP4 format videos through Chrome. In India alone, this new technology is already saving 138 TB of data on video in a single week — roughly 14 years of HD video!

Data Saver is also becoming smarter. When you are on a slow connection, Data Saver will automatically optimize HTTP websites to their essentials. These optimized pages save up to 90% of your data, loading 2 times faster!

Less time waiting for pages to load, more data savings, and video support. You will be glad you turned on Data Saver!

A new downloads experienceWe are also thinking about how you can keep using Chrome even when you go offline. We built the dinosaur game to keep you smiling even if you have no access to the internet, but we are doing even better.

With Chrome’s new download feature, when you come across a web page, music, picture, or video that you like, you can just tap the download button to save for later. You don’t need to worry about restarting your download if your connection is dropped, even for big video files. When Chrome goes back online, the downloads you’ve started will automatically resume.

To help you get back to all your content, we added a new home for all your downloads, right inside Chrome. Whether it’s the article you saved for later, or that movie trailer for the train ride home, you can access all the content while you are offline.

Downloads are now available on Chrome Beta and will be available soon for Chrome users everywhere.

Discover new content personalized for youWith features like Data Saver and downloads, Chrome is a great way to enjoy content on the mobile web. But we also want to make it easier to discover content you really care about.

Now, when you open a new tab in Chrome, you will see suggestions for websites to visit. But starting in the next release, you will be able to easily discover fresh content just for you. Whether it is the latest buzz from the web or getting back to your most recently downloaded pages, you can simply scroll down on the new tab page to discover all your content in one place!

These suggestions are also smart — as you use Chrome more, Chrome will learn what type of content you are interested in and suggest fresh content from your favorite sports team or your most visited sites. You’ll always have something interesting ready!

We believe that our focus on data savings, offline capabilities, and content discovery will make Chrome an even better place for you to experience the mobile web. Download the latest version of Chrome to be one of the first to try these features as we roll them out!

Posted by Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Vice President of Product and Data Minimalist

Last week, we released a new version of Chrome that includes new payment features and performance improvements. In fact, over the last year Chrome has seen double-digit improvements in speed and battery life. These improvements help you get more done, faster, and we thought you’d like an update.

Speed has always been a priority for Chrome. People spend so much time in the browser that even tiny page delays can add up to minutes of lost time every day. When measured with tools like Speedometer, improvements over the last year have made Chrome more than 15 percent faster on both desktop and Android. That’s good news if you’re working against a deadline or trying to place a last-minute order.

We also know that you want to get as much browsing time out of your laptop’s battery as possible. So Chrome now uses less battery for sites that people visit the most. For example, Chrome for Windows lets you watch more video on sites like Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube than it did a year ago.

Chrome 53 gives 2h 12m more Vimeo HD on a single charge

Of course, people use their browsers for more than just video. That’s why we’ve been improving battery life across the board, tracking progress using power measurement tools. As one example, Chrome for Mac now uses 33 percent less power for everything from videos and images to simple page scrolling. Whether you’re planning a vacation or getting work done, you now get more browsing time from a single battery charge.

We don’t just want Chrome to run faster, we want to help you get things done faster. That’s why we’ve also brought fast, seamless payments to Chrome on Android, including support for Android Pay, by adding support for the PaymentRequest web standard. So now when shopping online, you can check out with as little as a single tap.

Two years ago we launched Google Cast, an extension for Chrome that allowed you to show content from your favorite websites on the best screen in your home — your TV — using Chromecast. Whether watching your favorite show on Netflix, or sharing a photo slideshow at a family gathering, Google Cast makes it easy to extend the web to the big screen.

Since we launched Chromecast, we’ve been working to make casting even better. We’ve launched new Cast devices like Chromecast Audio and partnered with other manufacturers to make Cast-enabled TVs and speakers. We’ve also made significant improvements in quality, with the vast majority of casting sessions now in HD.

Casting from Chrome has become incredibly popular: In the past month alone, people have casted more than 38 million times from Chrome, watching and listening to more than 50 million hours of content.

Today we’re happy to announce that Google Cast is now built fully into Chrome, and anyone can now Cast without having to install or configure anything. When you’re on websites that are integrated with Cast, you’ll see the Cast icon appear when you’re on the same network as a Cast device — and with a couple of clicks you can view your content on your TV or listen to music on your speakers:You can also view websites that are not integrated with Cast on your TV by selecting the “Cast…” menu item from the Chrome menu:And you can now cast to even more places — including sharing with participants on a video call in Google Hangouts and the Cast for Education app, which we announced recently. Now you can share your presentation with your coworkers during a Hangout or to your peers in the classroom.

With Google Cast and Chrome, you can share what you love to watch with those around you. We’re excited to make this available to everyone. To get the new built-in Cast functionality all you need to do is make sure you have the latest version of Chrome.

Adobe Flash Player played a pivotal role in the adoption of video, gaming and animation on the Web. Today, sites typically use technologies like HTML5, giving you improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times. Going forward, Chrome will de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5. Here’s what that means for you.

Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. HTML5 is much lighter and faster, and publishers are switching over to speed up page loading and save you more battery life. You’ll see an improvement in responsiveness and efficiency for many sites.

This is similar to a change we made last September, when some Flash content became click-to-play with Chrome 42. This had an immediate, positive impact for our users by improving page load times and saving battery power.

In December, Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, except for sites which only support Flash. For those, you’ll be prompted to enable Flash when you first visit the site. Aside from that, the only change you’ll notice is a safer and more power-efficient browsing experience.

Flash helped make the Web a rich, dynamic experience, and shaped the modern set of web standards. We continue to work closely with Adobe to ensure that your web experience is as fast and secure as possible and to help the Web transition to HTML5.

With Chrome 52, video playback on Android now feels smoother, loads faster, and consumes less battery.Web video is huge, with over a billion hours played in Chrome every week on sites like Amazon, Facebook, The New York Times, Netflix and YouTube. Much…

We launched Chromebooks for people who wanted a fast, simple and secure computing experience. Chromebooks just work — open the lid, and within seconds, you’re on your favorite sites and apps, getting stuff done. Virus protection and automatic updates are built-in, so you don’t have to manage your computer. And that’s worked great for our users. Schools in the US are now buying more Chromebooks than all other devices combined — and in Q1 of this year, Chromebooks topped Macs in overall shipments to become the #2 most popular PC operating system in the US*.

We’ve been encouraged by this growth, but our users have often told us that they would like to do even more with their Chromebooks — run more apps, use Office files more easily, connect with a variety of apps, and do more when they’re offline.

So, we’re bringing Google Play (the most popular app store in the world) to Chromebooks. This means you’ll be able to download and use Android apps, so you can make a Skype call, work with Office files and be productive offline — or take a break with games like Minecraft, Hearthstone or Clash of Clans. The same apps that run on phones and tablets can now run on Chromebooks without compromising their speed, simplicity or security. This is good for users and great for developers – in addition to phones and tablets, they will be able to easily bring their apps to laptops. And all this is built on top of Chrome OS, so users will continue to have everything they love in their Chromebooks.

Google Play will start rolling out in the developer channel with M53 on the ASUS Chromebook Flip, the Acer Chromebook R 11 and the latest Chromebook Pixel. Over time, this will roll out to other Chromebooks in the market too. And, we’ve also been working with our partners to launch some great new devices specially designed for Play. Stay tuned for more details to come over the next few months.

We’ll keep a list of supported Chromebooks here, and will share news about new models on the Chrome channel on Google Plus and Twitter.

Chromebooks have always been about making computing more accessible for everyone, and by bringing together the best of Android and Chrome OS, we are taking a big leap forward. Not only are we addressing many of the existing needs and use cases that people have for their Chromebooks, we are also betting on the millions of developers who are innovating every day to build the next great experience that wasn’t even possible on PC platforms before. This is just the beginning, and we’re excited to see what the future holds for everyone!

Chrome reached a pretty big milestone this week – its 50th release! We originally launched Chrome to give users a fast, simple and secure browser. That still remains our mission today. And while there’s still much more to do – especially with the shift to mobile and providing a great experience for people using the mobile web for the first time – we thought we’d take a step back and reflect on our journey so far. Here at Google, we’re obsessed with stats, so we thought you might enjoy a whirlwind tour of Chrome, by the numbers.

Two weeks ago, we introduced Tilt Brush, a new app that enables artists to use virtual reality to paint the 3D space around them. Part virtual reality, part physical reality, it can be difficult to describe how it feels without trying it firsthand. Today, we bring you a little closer to the experience of painting with Tilt Brush using the powers of the web in a new Chrome Experiment titled Virtual Art Sessions.

Virtual Art Sessions lets you observe six world-renowned artists as they develop blank canvases into beautiful works of art using Tilt Brush. Each session can be explored from start to finish from any angle, including the artist’s perspective – all viewable right from the browser.

Virtual Art Sessions makes use of Google Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine for high-performance processing power to render large volumes of data in real time. This includes point cloud data of the artist’s physical form, 3D geometry data of the artwork, and position data of the VR controllers. It also relies on Chrome’s support of WebM video and WebGL to produce the 360° representations of the artists and artwork – the artist portrayals alone require the browser to draw over 200,000 points at 30 times a second. For a deeper look, read the technical case study or browse the project code that is available open source from the site’s tech page.

We hope this experiment provides a window into the world of painting in virtual reality using Tilt Brush. We are excited by this new medium and hope the experience leaves you feeling the same. Visit g.co/VirtualArtSessions to start exploring.

Whether you’re hard at work or play, your laptop should reflect your style and let your true self shine through. We’ve thought a lot about how to mirror our users’ needs in a new kind of laptop — one that not only helps you work smart, but also look bright. Anyone will see themselves embracing the revolutionary glint of the Chrome Chromebook1.

Chrome Chromebook adds dazzle to the power of our best-in-class hardware and software, with shiny design facets to inspire a new generation.

Enjoy tungsten space-grade chrome engineering with revolutionary new microchrome technology, so it’s light — in every sense of the word. The highly reflective chrome alloy case with two layers of automotive clear-coat creates infinite reflections, enveloping the Chrome Chromebook like a shimmering sheath. The platinum white backlit keyboard LED bounces light off a minimum of seven surfaces before striking the eye, and the included microfiber sleeve helps retain that just-unboxed glow.

Yet, even with these brilliant new features, Chrome Chromebooks are still about performance and function. With Chrome Chromebook’s radiant 4k lumen reflective properties and unheard-of pixel density, watching a movie rivals the beauty of staring into a solar eclipse. The magnificent CLED (Chrome Light-Emitting Diode) screen provides brightness settings that rival the Sun itself. You’ll be blinded by its sheer brilliance2.

Move toward the light. The Chrome Chromebook will be available for purchase online starting today in the U.S and will arrive in stores soon. Or if you can’t wait, try wrapping a Chromebook in tin foil to bask in the reflected glory. We hope you enjoy what’s next.

Last year, we brought the magic of Google Cast, the technology behind Chromecast, to speakers, Android TVs, game consoles and set-up boxes. Today, we’re excited to start casting to VIZIO’s new SmartCast P-Series displays as well as to VIZIO soundbars and speakers.

The P-series now comes with Google Cast built in, which means you can use your smartphone or tablet as your remote to cast your favorite entertainment directly to the big screen. Simply tap the Cast button from apps like Netflix to watch Daredevil, YouTube to stream daredevil stunts, or Google Play Music to get pumped for your own stunts. You can also mirror any website from the Chrome browser on your laptop. So whether you’re planning your next vacation and looking through flights and hotels with the family, or want to share a video from your last epic trip, just look for the Google Cast extension in the corner of your desktop browser.

The VIZIO P-Series also supports casting Ultra HD (up to 4K) and High Dynamic Range with Dolby Vision content (bright, clear colors!). Included with every P-series is VIZIO’s 6” Android tablet remote, a tablet that lives in the living room and can cast all your favorite content.

We’re also changing the name of the Chromecast app to Google Cast app, to better reflect that Google Cast technology is now supported across a wide range of devices such as Chromecast, TVs, displays and speakers. The Google Cast app makes it easy for you to discover great stuff to watch, find more apps, customize backdrop, and more. The updated Google Cast app will be rolling out this week on Android & iOS.

To learn more about Google Cast and the Google Cast app, visit our new website.

This year, for Music in Our Schools Month, we wanted to help make learning about music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. We built a set of experiments that let anyone explore how music works. It’s called Chrome Music Lab, and you can check it out at g.co/musiclab.

You can play with sound, rhythm, melody, and more. Chrome Music Lab is all built for the web, so you can start playing instantly, whether you’re on a tablet, phone, or laptop. Just like today’s Clara Rockmore doodle, the experiments are all built with the Web Audio API, a freely-accessible, open web standard that lets developers create and manipulate sound right in the browser. We’re also providing open-source code so that others can build new experiments based on what we’ve started.

Exploring music can help spark curiosity in all kinds of ways. We hope these experiments inspire you – whether they give you a new perspective on music, make you more curious about math and science, or even make you think of new ways to teach or code.

Chrome gives you a fast and secure way to explore the web, no matter what device you’re using. To keep all of our users safe and to help them save on data usage, we now show 5 million Safe Browsing warning messages every day and have over 100 million people using Data Saver mode in Chrome on Android. This saves up to 100 Terabytes of data a day — enough data to store the complete works of Shakespeare, 10 million times!The latest version of Chrome brings some fresh updates for the new year to get you moving faster and stay secure.

Speed and stability on iOS

The latest Chrome for iOS is significantly faster and more stable, so you can pick up where you left off browsing (on any device) without worrying about Chrome crashing on misbehaving webpages. In fact, tests show that the latest version reduces Chrome’s crash rate by 70 percent and speeds up JavaScript execution significantly.

These improvements will gradually be rolled out starting today—just update Chrome to get rolling. (If you want a peek under the hood, check out this update in the Chromium blog.)

Keep an eye on your data usage

If you’re using your computer at a library or coffee shop with spotty public WiFi, it’s helpful to be able to manage your data usage—which is why we created Chrome’s new Data Saver extension. It reduces the data your computer needs to access websites using the same compression technology as Chrome for Android’s Data Saver mode. Clicking on “Details” will tell how much data you’ve saved, and which websites are scooping up most data.

Keeping Chromies secure online

Of course, even with all the features Chrome offers to help you stay secure online, there’s a lot you can do too to protect yourself. A few pro-tips:

Keep your computer free of unwanted software with the Chrome Cleanup Tool. This program sweeps through your computer for software that’s been identified by Google and our industry partners as unhelpful or malicious. To date, 40 million people have successfully cleaned up their computers with this tool.

Starting in this latest release, you’ll begin to see all extensions to the right of the URL bar, so you can easily remove anything you don’t recognize. Just right click the extension icon and select “Remove from Chrome.”

Android TV and Google Cast for audio devices were introduced to give you more freedom and control over your entertainment. Today we’re bringing even more TV and speaker makers onboard for both Android TV and Google Cast. When it comes to home entertainment, the living room is more connected than ever. Approximately 88% of consumer electronic devices shipped in 2015 were Internet-enabled.¹ When devices in the home are connected, it’s important to have platforms that make it easy for you to stream your favorite digital music and movies.

Android TV

Android TV brings apps, games, movies, shows, music and more to the biggest screen in your home. From smart TVs to cable box operators, many devices support the Android TV experience. Now you’ve got even more options to find the device that’s right for you. If you’re looking for a new TV, you can select an Android TV from Sony, Sharp and Philips. Later this year, Android TV will be available from Arcelik, Vestel, RCA, Hisense, TCL and Bang & Olufsen. And, for our users in Indonesia, Linknet now has an Android TV offering.

Google Cast for speakers

Google Cast, the same technology built into Chromecast, is now embedded directly into speakers, sound bars, and A/V receivers so you can cast music from your favorite app on your phone or any music streaming website on Chrome. Throughout 2016, you’ll be able to enjoy Google Cast speakers from B&O Play, Harman Kardon, Onkyo, Philips, Pioneer, and Raumfeld. Sony and LG, who were among the first to include Google Cast in their speakers, are also refreshing their speaker lineups. Cast-enabled software and hardware from Frontier Silicon and StreamUnlimited will make it easier for more audio companies to join the Google Cast family.

Recently, we announced that multi-room synchronization is available on Chromecast Audio. Multi-room sync lets you group speakers connected to Chromecast Audio devices together so you can listen to the same song throughout the house. In 2016, multi-room sync functionality will come to Google Cast speakers, allowing you to mix and match Cast-enabled speakers from your favorite brands with speakers connected to Chromecast Audio.

Whether you’re cozied up at home or on the road, Chromecast has a bunch of new goodies for you and the family. Just in time for the holidays, we’re adding more Chromecast-enabled games for both Android and iOS to the list.

Now casting is Rovio’s Angry Birds Friends, featuring everyone’s favorite red bird, where you can compete in weekly tournaments. Also available is Ubisoft’s Driver Speedboat Paradise, where you race your boat through beautiful canals and waterways around the world.

Angry Birds Friends, by Rovio

We’re also introducing several new family-friendly Hasbro games which have been remastered for the big screen experience, including Monopoly Here & Now, Yahtzee Blitz, The Game of Life, and Scrabble Blitz 2.0. These are perfect companions for the downtime before that ball drops this New Year’s Eve. And lastly, we’re excited to introduce a new way to play Risk — on Chromecast. Now you can compete for world domination with friends and family. (Hasbro games available in the US and CA only)

With Chromecast, you can get a great split-screen experience for your mobile games. For example, if you are playing Monopoly Here & Now, only you can see your cards on your phone while the moves you decide to make get displayed on the big screen. It unlocks fun multiplayer experiences, and the ability for you to use your phone or tablet as the controller while gameplay takes place on the TV.

Monopoly Here & Now Big Screen, by Hasbro

Many games now work with Chromecast, and many more will continue to be made available.So whether you’re playing with friends or by yourself, you can now play mobile games on the biggest screen in the house. Check out these great games and more on chromecast.com/apps.

Posted by Wendi Zhang, Chromecast Business Development Games Lead and Ultimate Bird Caster

You don’t need to be a Jedi to master a lightsaber — just go to g.co/lightsaber on your phone or desktop to wield your very own lightsaber in our latest Chrome Experiment, “Lightsaber Escape,” built for your phone and computer.

Inspired by Star Wars: The Force Awakens, “Lightsaber Escape” immerses you in a galaxy far, far away, bringing the film to life through modern web technologies. Your adventure begins in a Star Destroyer, where you’ll need to use your phone as a lightsaber to escape the First Order.

The experience was developed in collaboration with Disney, Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic. The rich 3D graphics were built with WebGL, enabling beautiful, high fidelity 3D renders within the browser. We’re also using WebRTC and WebSockets to enable high accuracy, real-time communication between your mobile and desktop devices, reducing latency and improving interactivity. Plus, building with web standards means the experience works across browsers, and without plug-ins. For a more in-depth tech overview, you can check out our technical case study on developers.google.com.